Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale

Gaechter, Simon; Starmer, Chris; Tufano, Fabio

Abstract

Understanding the nature and influence of social relationships is of increasing interest to behavioral economists, and behavioral scientists more generally. In turn, this creates a need for tractable, and reliable, tools for measuring fundamental aspects of social relationships. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' (IOS) Scale, a handy pictorial tool for measuring the subjectively perceived closeness of a relationship. The tool is highly portable, very easy for subjects to understand and takes less than 1 minute to administer. Across our three online studies with a diverse adult population (n=772) we show that six different scales designed to measure relationship closeness are all highly significantly positively correlated with the IOS Scale. We then conduct a Principal Component Analysis to construct an Index of Relationship Closeness and find that it correlates very strongly (ρ=.85) with the IOS Scale. We conclude that the IOS Scale is a psychologically meaningful and highly reliable measure of the subjective closeness of relationships.

Citation

Gaechter, S., Starmer, C., & Tufano, F. (2015). Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale. PLoS ONE, 10(6), Article e0129478. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0129478

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jun 12, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jun 17, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 17, 2015
• Journal: PLoS ONE
• Electronic ISSN: 1932-6203
• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 6
• Article Number: e0129478
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0129478
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/754571
• Publisher URL: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0129478